Rathlee Castle

Ráth Lao — Fort of the Calves

Rathlee occupies a headland on the north Sligo coast, in the parish of Kilglass, barony of Tireragh. Conor Mac Hale (The O’Dubhda Family History, 1990) includes Rathlee in his list of twenty O’Dubhda castles. No medieval castle fabric survives on the site today. The structure visible on the headland is a Napoleonic signal tower, built in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and it is this tower — not a medieval O’Dubhda fortress — that passing visitors encounter.

I. The Placename

The townland is recorded on logainm.ie as Rathlee / Ráth Lao, glossed as “ring-fort of the calves.” John O’Donovan, writing in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for County Sligo in 1836, gives the same reading — “Rath Laogh, fort of the calves” — and notes the survival of the ringfort element in the placename. The first element, ráth, denotes an earthen ringfort rather than a stone castle; the placename therefore records an early medieval enclosure on this ground, not a later tower house.

II. The O’Dubhda Site

Rathlee falls within the historic territory of Tír Fhiachrach Muaidhe, ruled by the O’Dubhda (O’Dowd) from the eleventh century onward. Mac Hale (1990) lists Rathlee among the twenty castles associated with the family. Whether that refers to the ráth itself, to a timber hall defended by the earthworks, or to a later stone fortification now entirely lost, is not possible to establish from surviving evidence. No masonry of medieval date is visible on the headland, and the site does not appear in Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) as a notable ruin.

An older stone plaque mounted on the wall of the present tower reads “Ruin of O’Dowd Castle — Lochtar Rath, a seat of Kings of Tirerach.” The provenance of the plaque and the date of its placement are not known to us. Researchers working with the Signal Stations Project have noted that the “Lochtar Rath” name sits more comfortably with Roslee Castle, five kilometres to the west, where a tower house does survive; the possibility that the inscription conflates the two sites cannot be ruled out.

III. The Standing Tower — A Napoleonic Signal Station

The rectangular two-storey tower now occupying the headland is one of eighty-one coastal signal stations erected around the Irish coast between 1804 and 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars. The chain ran from Pigeon House in Dublin round the south, west and north of the island and back to the Pigeon House, and was operated by the Royal Navy in conjunction with a yeomanry guard. Rathlee formed one link in the Sligo–Mayo section, signalling between the neighbouring towers at Roslee (Easkey) to the west and Knocklane to the east.

Each tower carried a mast from which flags, balls and pendants were hoisted in coded combinations to pass intelligence of enemy sail along the coast. The bartizan that survives at the corner of the Rathlee tower is characteristic of the standard plan used for the signal-station series: two storeys over a vaulted ground floor, with a small machicolated projection covering the entrance.

IV. Later Use and Memorial

Following the Napoleonic threat the signal network was gradually abandoned; by the mid-nineteenth century most towers, Rathlee included, stood empty. The site was brought back into service during the Second World War, when the Coast Watching Service of the Irish Defence Forces established Look-Out Post (LOP) No. 66 on the headland. Coast-watchers logged shipping and aircraft movements between 1939 and 1945 from the vicinity of the older tower, as they did at dozens of other former signal stations around the coast.

In 2006 a memorial plaque was mounted on the wall of the tower by local subscribers. It reads:

Rathlee Signalling Tower — in memory of those who worked here and all who perished at sea. 2nd July 2006.

The plaque is useful beyond its commemorative purpose: it is the structure’s own self-identification, and should prompt caution in anyone tempted to describe the building as a medieval castle.

V. Local Tradition

A small body of local tradition attaches to the tower and its surroundings, collected during the Bailiúchán na Scol (Schools’ Folklore Scheme) of 1937–1939 and now available through dúchas.ie. References to Rathlee in the Kilglass and Easkey school manuscripts record memory of the coast-watching function and the sea losses of the surrounding townlands, rather than any surviving medieval legend. Where earlier accounts of “underground tunnels” and “hidden chambers” have circulated, we have not found them in any primary source, and they are not repeated here.